Jackson Jambalaya

I can my own chicken broth because store bought is awful. The best website for current canning best practices is https://nchfp.uga.edu/ . Ball has some creative books for canning recipes, I can a black bean soup that is delicious as well.

Keep up the good work.

My wife's garden in our yard is nowhere near the size in the article, but it may as well be. She's a country girl has takes her gardens very seriously. I don't get in her way, just eat the yield.

Reading this sure brings back memories and some no so pleasant..."push plow" comes to mind.

10:27 - We make and freeze our own chicken broth too, usually from Sam" rotisserie chicken bones and skin. Then we pull away the meat, and put it into freezer containers, Newk's cups and such, then cover it with broth to freeze. One chicken usually yields three portions of pulled meat and two or three portions of broth. Not bad for a $5.00 precooked bird. Usually, we buy two and have chicken salad and a casserole from the second, after adding the bones and skin to our broth pot.

11:05 The wife is our landscape plant enthusiast. Other than three or four tomato plants, we work no vegetable gardens now days there isn't enough room to do any good. She does work several really pretty flower beds though.

11:34 - When we divided our folks gardening tools, one of the siblings took the push plow. I was happy to see it going to someone else's yard shed. That thing demands a lot of work to achieve any results. I feel your pain, brother.

We always had a garden AND a push plow. Pop would make using the push plow so easy and when I tried to use it back then I couldnt make it do right for hell nor high water. I did learn how to garden because of my folks and my taste for fresh produce.

I helped and paid attention to Mamma in the kitchen when it was time break out the Pressure Canners. I'm glad I did too! You can put most anything up in a jar as long as you do it correctly. Meats, soups, gumbos, broths, any and all produce from the garden. Pressure canned or water bathed.

We grow a lot of vegetables. I pickle or blanch and freeze them. I make chicken, beef, pork and seafood stocks and freeze them. The only broth I can in the pressure cooker is beef bone broth. I get the bones from a neighbor who raises cattle and puts one in her freezer every year.

I also can my homegrown tomato sauce and use them to make to salsa, also canned. Not to mention all the jellies, jams and fruit preserves I make. We eat better than most people and probably spend less money on food than others.

Good Article.

I don't can anymore. I just give my extra produce away. Building raised beds was the best thing I've done in a long time.

Gawd I remember having to shell lima beans as a kid. I was a nail biter and my poor thumbs would hurt so badly. I tried to pick up the ones that were easy to open.

I used to actually enjoy Zerobear/Polybear's contributions.

But now I can't see anything he/she posts.
Yeah ... I have an old iMac and have updated by browser over the years, but this person's posts are
are always "blank" on JJ.

No doubt it's my old iMac, but please consider a different platform so all of us may read this person's weekly recipes.

Email me and I'll send it to you. If it's a real old Mac it might not be reading HTML 5

Regarding the comment about your corn not having worms - yes, I believe that is due to pesticide use. We have an elderly relative who grew up on the farm who gripes about the bug bites on the peas we grow. I’d rather eat a few big bitten vegetables than consume pesticides. Lots of older folks use that stuff - it. It’s have seemed like a miracle to folks when they came out. We have used Neem oil with some limited success, possibly because natural pesticides have to be reapplied after rains. It’s tough to keep up with a garden when you have a “public job”, as my grandpa called it.

We grow a small garden every year but not enough to fill the freezers without buying some peas and/or beans.

One thing I have wondered about blanching - you mention freezing them in the same liquid they were blanched in. My wife is impatient and rinses them to cook them off. We don’t eat the pot liquor or drown our cornbread in it like some do. If you don’t do that, are you really consuming more vitamins and minerals? I can’t wrap my mind around how that would work.

Tell me exactly how to make that broth using the Sam's rotisserie chicken bones, skin, etc. I will try that. Thanks.

Enjoyed this so much. I have canned tomatoes (water bath) and green beans (pressure) before. It made me appreciate what my grandmothers did. I wasn’t shelling peas at the same time, either. The payoff is large, but I never did it again, I know how, though. Love my little garden and also love buying peas already shelled.
Thanks for the realistic snapshot of the recent past.

7:48am
Bone and Skin Stock

1. Pick all meat off the roasted chicken, putting all else into pot of boiling (filtered/bottled) water, cover and reserve picked chicken in refrigerator.

2. To the boiling water with chicken discards, add two medium bay leaves, dried onion flakes, onion ends, celery bottom, Cumin seed, salt.

3. Cover and simmer for 4 hours, occasionally adding more water as it will steam off.

4. Use tongs to remove most solids from pot into tripled grocery plastic bag for trash, strain the rest through a fine mesh strainer into clean pot, cover and refrigerate. Next day lift off and discard fat from top of stock, which will be gelatin under the fat.

5. Use stock for soup, stew or to cook vegetables in. Chicken meat is easily shredded to add to rustic chicken-vegetable stew. Boil shrimp shells in chicken bone stock for seafood stock as base for Gumbo.

pickyourown.org also has fantastic step by step instructions and recipes.

That was really interesting. I shared the link to that on my FB.